The academic and non-academic domains surrounding psychedelics/entheogens have become increasingly saturated with self-appointed experts—figures who confidently assert epistemic authority and presume entitlement to have the loudest voices. Because these domains remain fluid, emergent, and only loosely regulated, the criteria by which expertise is claimed or conferred are inconsistent, ad hoc, and frequently contested. This instability raises a central epistemic question: Who, precisely, ought to be recognized as an authoritative knower of psychedelic experience and its interpretations? The stakes of this question are amplified by the rapid expansion of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, where the consolidation of expertise is entangled with aspirations for cultural influence and economic gain.

This paper interrogates competing claims to authority within psychedelic discourse, asking whether insider epistemologies—those privileging individuals who ingest psychedelics—offer a legitimate basis for expertise. Does experience alone, or the accumulation of rarer or riskier experiences, constitute epistemic weight? Conversely, if authority is granted to the biomedical establishment, which medical practitioners—those funded by pharmaceutical corporations or those bankrolled by entrepreneurial technologists—are to be trusted?

Drawing on cultural theory, philosophy of mind, and emerging scholarship in psychedelic studies, I argue that many self-proclaimed experts function less like rigorous scholars and more like influencers or minor celebrities who cultivate followings, curate personas, and perform authority rather than embody it. Expertise in this domain, I contend, is not only unstable but also shaped by improvisational and economically inflected practices of self-legitimation. By examining these dynamics, this paper reveals how claims to psychedelic knowledge often illuminate broader sociocultural economies in which charisma, narrative, and capital—not epistemic rigor—determine whose voices dominate the discourse.

Deepak Sarma is the Inaugural Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities at Case Western Reserve University.

This talk will feature material from my forthcoming book, which critically examines the “discovery” and subsequent globalization of the plant known to scientists as Salvia divinorum. A psychedelic variety of sage, the plant is endemic only to the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico, where it is known as xka pastora. The Sierra’s Indigenous people have long used xka pastora in healing rituals, alongside the psilocybin mushrooms for which the region has been famous since the 1960s. Using a variety of materials – archival research, textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, oral histories, and assessment of developments ranging from patent claims to stock valuations – I analyze competing narratives surrounding the history of these psychedelic species. I detail how the stories that outsiders tell about the plants differ dramatically from narratives used by Sierra people, especially histories of “scientific discovery” that are both widely disseminated and routinely taken at face value. I argue that such narratives of “discovery” promote discursive violence: harmful ways of talking that erase the contributions of Sierra people and enable lucrative forms of resource extraction and commercialization. Attempts to redress this pervasive injustice requires recognizing the essential but routinely minimized role that women and Indigenous people from the Sierra played in the “discovery” of these psychedelic substances. Furthermore, this is but one of many cases where uncritical acceptance of discourses about scientific advancement produces destructive erasures that legitimize neo-colonial practices central to the workings of the pharmaceutical industry and biomedicine in general. Making the contributions of Indigenous people visible advances what I call botanical reparations: the call to place Indigenous people at the center of the “psychedelic renaissance” and social reckonings about the future of the psychedelic plants whose therapeutic potential is the product of centuries of Indigenous labor and innovation.

Paja Faudree is a professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Brown University.

This paper argues that attending to the materiality of psychedelics can open new directions for historical research by making visible the infrastructures, bodies and non-human agencies that disappear in narrative accounts focused only on ideas, therapies or “experiences.” Taking Portugal as a case study, it reconstructs the entangled trajectories of rye ergot (Claviceps purpurea) and peasant women from the end of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, showing how ergot moved from fields and commons, through midwives’ practices of abortion and childbirth, into hospital wards, pharmaceutical factories and Sandoz laboratories, where Portuguese samples supplied material to lysergic acid synthesis in 1938. By following the fungus as a concrete material actor growing on poor soils, harvested by women and children, traded by smugglers — the article foregrounds how psychedelic histories are embedded in reproductive labour, agrarian ecologies and global supply chains.

The study contends that the contemporary psychedelic renaissance, by positing a sharp historical discontinuity between LSD and its fungal precursor, helps to perpetuate the much older elimination of women’s vernacular knowledge of psychoactive plants and its replacement by scientific knowledge. This erasure also serves psychedelic capitalism: it is easier to frame psychedelics as either ancestral Indigenous traditions located elsewhere or as products of cutting-edge biomedical science than to acknowledge a specifically European, gendered psychedelic culture rooted in criminalized practices of reproductive control. This paper mobilizes the notion of the “witch” to think this violence on a broader scale. Taking the relation “ergot-witch” as an analytical lens, it shows how a focus on materiality allows historians to connect altered states of consciousness to questions of land use, class, gendered violence, and pharmaceutical profit. Ultimately, it highlights the importance of material history and feminist history to reconfigure the scales and temporalities of psychedelic history, and in doing so challenges dominant narratives of what counts as a “psychedelic” past.

Maria do Mar Gago is a researcher with the Institute of Contemporary History in Lisbon, Portugal. 

Why do psychedelic journeys often feel simultaneously meaningful and impossible to articulate? In this paper the central research question asks how psychedelic states reorganize both perception and communicative capacity, positing that psychedelic experience operates less as a reservoir of imagery and more as a reconfiguration of the mind’s information architecture: not only a reordering of perception but also of communicative possibility. Drawing on information theory, complex adaptive systems, and aesthetic philosophy, I investigate how psychedelics behave as convivial microtechnologies whose primary effect is the modulation of entropy across perceptual and conceptual channels. Rather than producing visions ex nihilo, psychedelics loosen the relative-entropic constraint architectures that ordinarily stabilize meaning, allowing attention to oopen adjacent possibility spaces typically inaccessible to everyday cognition.
Through case studies and comparative analysis, from mid-century counterculture to contemporary therapeutic settings, I examine moments when psychedelic experience pushes perception toward an intersubjective mode of aesthetic singularity—a zone where familiar interpretive regimes can no longer hold the load-bearing weight of experience, much less of the social viscosity of communication—as form and meaning unspool from each other and foreground awareness of the world’s latent complexity. Methodologically, this paper synthesizes textual analysis, aesthetic theory, and systems modeling to map how psychedelic states temporarily rewire the flow of information: from a difference that makes a difference (information as being), to a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing (information as becoming).
By reframing psychedelic consciousness as an informational and aesthetic operation, the paper’s main findings demonstrate how such states generate novel communicative and perceptual capacities while simultaneously exceeding everyday linguistic capture. It concludes by suggesting that this singularity is not an endpoint but an opening: a recalibration of how humans engage the world’s complexity, and how aesthetic life offers tools for navigating the informational density of the present.

Jason Hoelscher is professor of interdisciplinary art at Georgia Southern University.

This paper examines the legal and regulatory conflict between Sacred Sanctuary, an ayahuasca church formed after the 2024 closure of the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Soul Quest closed following bankruptcy and the denial of a religious exemption under the Controlled Substances Act, prompting former members and facilitators to establish Sacred Sanctuary. After conducting ceremonies for over a year, Sacred Sanctuary was raided by the DEA, temporarily suspending ritual practice while authorities considered criminal charges. In 2026, the church resumed ceremonies after the DEA declined prosecution. This paper argues that legal conflict is not merely a constraint on religion but a productive force that generates religious agency, collective ethical self-ownership, and institutional legitimacy. Sacred Sanctuary navigated legal pressures while continuing religious practice, illustrating how ritual and institutional authority are shaped through engagement with the state. Drawing on theories of governmentality, legal pluralism, and the co-production of religion and the secular, the Sacred Sanctuary case demonstrates that church and state in the United States are mutually constituted through regulatory enforcement, negotiation, and legal contestation. These cases illuminate law as a formative site of religious life. Religious freedom, sovereignty, and governance emerge through ongoing contestation rather than settled doctrine, and religious authority is continuously produced through interactions with state power.

Tarryl Janik is a Lecturer in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Guruism is a term created by psychiatrist Robert Lifton to describe a strong and potentially unhealthy reverence for a spiritual leader, healer or teacher. Cultic dynamics is a term derived from Lifton’s work and developed by Dr Janja Lalich, which refers to group dynamics that arise in religious and healing communities, which can become over-controlling and abusive. We argue, and have some early evidence to show, that psychedelic drugs amplify guruism and cultic dynamics in psychedelic organizations such as churches, training programs, research groups, NGOs, or therapeutic relationships. While there is nothing essentially harmful or unethical in these processes, they can make abuse more likely to occur and go unchecked. This is a critical issue for the psychedelic field, and yet there is a lack of scholarly literature on the topic.

CPEP has pursued this research topic for the last three years through a range of methodologies: theoretical papers and literature review (Evans and Adams 2025), quantitative research (Evans 2026, forthcoming), interviews, presentations and training modules, and investigative journalism. This talk will show how psychedelics amplify guruism and cultic dynamics, present case-studies showing why this sometimes leads to harmful and abusive situations and discuss what psychedelic organizations such as churches can do to try and limit the harm from these processes. 

Jules Evans is the Director of The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. 

This paper draws on my doctoral dissertation research and my advocacy with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to examine a central moral contradiction within contemporary psychedelic spirituality: the pursuit of healing for predominantly white populations through Indigenous medicines, while the religious traditions that safeguarded those medicines were, until very recently, violently suppressed. 

Focusing on peyote and Native American Church traditions, the paper situates the contemporary psychedelic movement within a longer religious history of persecution, prohibition, and forced assimilation. For more than a century, Native American spiritual knowledge, ceremonial practices, and plant medicines were criminalized and targeted for eradication through federal Indian policy—most notably the U.S. federal Indian boarding school era, which sought to sever Native peoples from their religions, languages, and relationships to land in the name of Christian civilization. 

Using a mixed-methods, Indigenous-centered approach—including surveys, interviews, and focus groups with tribal citizens across the United States—my research demonstrates that many tribal participants experience the modern psychedelic renaissance not as healing, but as a continuation of colonial harm. While psychedelic substances are increasingly framed as therapeutic and spiritually transformative, Indigenous communities continue to carry unresolved intergenerational trauma rooted in religious repression, land dispossession, historical prohibition, and contemporary appropriation. Participants emphasized that healing is not inherent in psychedelic substances themselves, but in the restoration of land-based practices, kinship systems, spiritual sovereignty, and cultural survival.  

This paper argues that psychedelic spirituality divorced from historical accountability constitutes a form of healing without repentance—one that reproduces extraction and erasure rather than repair. By centering Indigenous religious history and boarding school trauma, this presentation calls for a moral and theological reckoning: true healing requires justice, repair, and the honoring of Native spiritual sovereignty, not the continued consumption of Indigenous medicines without accountability.

Christine Diindiisi-McCleave is an advocate and researcher with the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund. 

This paper examines how gendered bodies mediate experiences of spirit possession within the Santo Daime religion, a transnational ayahuasca-based tradition that emerged in the Brazilian Amazon by the late 20th century. It asks: how do different daimista women across the world experience and negotiate spirit possession under the influence of ayahuasca in the context of Santo Daime, and how does this shape the globalization of the religion? While much scholarship on Santo Daime has focused on its negotiations with the public sphere, less attention has been given to a visceral approach exploring how people actually experience the religion. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in different countries, including participant observation in ceremonies and interviews with around 30 female leaders, mediums, and practitioners, this study examines how women articulate the intersections between ayahuasca, globalization, embodiment, spiritual agency, and personal identity. 
The analysis also highlights how the phenomenology of possession is co-constituted by non-human agents such as the daime (ayahuasca) itself and the spirits incorporated during ritual work. These agents participate in shaping affect, knowledge, and authority, revealing a more-than-human network of relationships that challenges both anthropocentric understandings of religious experience and Western feminist assumptions that equate agency with individual autonomy and human self-determination. Through the embodied act of incorporation, women not only negotiate their positions within Santo Daime’s hierarchies but also weave bridges with Afro-Brazilian religions such as Umbanda, integrating their symbolic and ritual elements into the transnalization of ayahuasca. 
These processes demonstrate how female mediums, together with ayahuasca and the spirits, expand, negotiate, and transform Santo Daime’s cosmology and aesthetics as they carry it into new cultural terrains. By situating these practices within debates on gender, embodiment, and non-human agency, the paper argues that women’s possession experiences constitute a key locus for understanding the globalization of psychedelic religions. Ultimately, they reveal how bodies, plants, and spirits collaboratively reconfigure spiritual authority and generate new forms of relational and material power in contemporary religiosity. 

Paulina Valamiel holds a PhD in Sociology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). 

This presentation draws from an ongoing qualitative study examining multigenerational perspectives on psilocybin mushrooms among urban Native American participants across the Southwest and Northwest United States. Although psilocybin has gained prominence within clinical research and emerging policy debates, limited scholarship has explored how Indigenous people across different generations interpret and engage with psilocybin, whether as a spiritual medicine, a recreational substance, a site of stigma, or a potential healing modality. The study asks: How do Native participants conceptualize psilocybin across generations, and in what ways are these perspectives shaped by cultural histories, intergenerational experiences, and contemporary discourses on wellness? 

Using semi-structured interviews with 30 Native participants aged 18 to 80, the study applies Constructivist Grounded Theory and Generational Theory, informed by Indigenous relational methodologies, to analyze how psilocybin meanings develop over the life course. Preliminary analysis reveals three central thematic domains: (1) shifting roles of psilocybin over time from experimentation, exploration, and countercultural influence among Baby Boomers to intentional trauma processing, identity work, and spiritual reconnection among younger generations; (2) tensions between curiosity, stigma, and the broader project of reclaiming Indigenous relationships with plant medicines; and (3) a recognized need for culturally grounded education, harm reduction, and community-based guidance as psilocybin becomes increasingly visible in media, research, and public policy arenas. 

Findings suggest that psilocybin is understood as both a pharmacological agent as well as a relational and interpretive experience shaped by family narratives, historical trauma, cultural continuity, and contemporary social networks. The coexistence of spiritual, recreational, and conservative viewpoints within the same communities underscores the heterogeneity of Indigenous perspectives and challenges assumptions of a unified Indigenous stance on psychedelics.

This work advances conversations within the Humanities and Religion tracks by centering Indigenous epistemologies and narrative meaning-making, illuminating how Native communities are engaging with an evolving psychedelic landscape. 

Marlena Robbins (Diné) is a Doctor of Public Health candidate at UC Berkeley. 

Debates over the role of psychedelics in the history of religion remain polarized between two inadequate interpretive positions: pharmacological Calvinism, which treats psychedelics as dangerous narcotics, and the entheogenic school, which elevates them to universal sacraments of perennial wisdom. This paper argues that both approaches emerged out of a deeper problem, which I term the "Drug Fog of War." This paper introduces the concept of the Drug Fog of War to account for how the prevailing interpretive schools misconstrue the global history of psychedelics. Adapting Carl von Clausewitz’s notion of the “fog of war,” the Drug Fog of War names the epistemic distortion produced by the U.S. War on Drugs, launched by Richard Nixon in 1970. While this legal regime disproportionately targeted BIPOC communities it also generated an intellectual climate that marginalized psychedelic networks as objects of serious inquiry. Psychedelic drugs were not merely criminalized; their role in human history was excluded from serious scholarly discourse. This exclusion inspired the reductionism of pharmacological Calvinism, and the entheogenic school’s maximalist interpretation of psychedelics. This paper stages a methodological intervention by dismantling the spurious conceptual frameworks born out of the Drug War, such as “counterculture,” while advancing an empirically grounded historicism capable of recovering the persistence, mutations, and diversity of psychedelic networks. The paper concludes by applying this new empirical approach to psychedelic activism in the 1980s, a forgotten, yet pivotal part of modern psychedelic history.  

J. Christian Greer is a Lecturer at Stanford University School of Medicine. 

This paper begins with a disappearance: the niños santos or sacred mushrooms are withdrawing, and Mazatec healers insist that this vanishing is a message. In the Sierra Mazateca, healers and mushroom gatherers describe the growing absence of niños santos from places that were once rich with them. Finding them is increasingly difficult, and even when they appear, their strength seems diminished. This retreat echoes a warning voiced decades ago by María Sabina, the world-renowned Mazatec curandera who foresaw a time when the mushrooms would lose their force and withdraw in response to disrespect. Their withdrawal is not metaphorical. It signals a profound disturbance in the multispecies and spiritual relations that sustain Mazatec life. Once rooted in a localized ecospiritual world, the niños santos now confront the pressures of climate disruption, psychedelic tourism, and the commodification of Indigenous knowledge. 

Drawing on our collaborative ethnographic project in Huautla de Jiménez, we combine autoethnography, participation in healing ceremonies, and interviews with mushroom gatherers and healers. These testimonies offer rare insight into what it means for mushrooms to speak in Mazatec worlds. Healers recount how the mushrooms can grow scared, hide deep inside the earth, or withhold their word when confronted with ecological disturbance and extraction. Through these voices, the niños santos emerge as living agents who signal fatigue, caution, and refusal, unsettling the assumption that psychedelic substances simply act on humans rather than communicating with them. 

Recent multispecies research shows that plants, fungi, spirits, and landscapes act as intentional agents and communicative partners who shape ecological, perceptual, and political worlds. Studies in plant sensing, Indigenous relational ontologies, and fungal ecology reveal that healing and knowledge emerge from dense interspecies relations rather than human-centered frameworks. 

Our project pushes this conversation further by centering Mazatec mushrooms as speaking earth-beings whose withdrawal is not silence but communication. What the niños santos are saying, and why they are saying it now, forms the core revelation of our paper. 

Annalisa Butticci is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. Osiris Garcia Cerqueda is a Mazatec historian and Affiliated Researcher at Georgetown University. 

The relationship between the practice of mind-body discipline (yoga) in Indian traditions and its use within psychedelic culture has had a storied place in the academic and popular imagination. This has been the case at least since the publication of Gordon Wasson’s Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), in which the Indologist Wendy Doniger endorsed the view that yoga emerged out of attempts to endogenously reproduce the effects of the ritual use of a psychoactive soma or “elixir” through ascetic techniques. In this paper, I present a more nuanced view of soma and, more broadly, the use of herbs (oṣadhi) as they appear in the orbit of the history and philosophy of yoga traditions in India, especially with respect to Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. Having broadly sketched out this terrain, I apply this understanding to the ways in which yoga (including physical, breath, and meditative practices) has been adapted for use within contemporary psychedelic culture, especially within Oregon’s legal psilocybin framework (both macro and microdosing) and emergent psychedelic churches. Ultimately, I argue for the refined view that the yogic application of soma and oṣadhi, both in traditional and modern contexts, is better viewed in pluralistic terms as evoking effects that range from primarily somatic to mildly and significantly psychoactive, the latter including nootropic as well as psychedelic uses and effects. This, in turn, reflects a historical tension between the use of such substances for longevity (dīrghāyu) and for attaining extraordinary modes of perception and action, namely accomplishment (siddhi). 

Stuart Sarbacker is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University and Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions.

The federal government is on the verge of moving marijuana out of Schedule I, the most restrictive category in the Controlled Substances Act. For decades, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s definition of one of the CSA’s scheduling criteria, “currently accepted medical use,” has proved an insurmountable barrier to reclassifying non-FDA-approved drugs, including marijuana and psychedelics, out of Schedule I. The DEA has required randomized controlled trials like those needed for FDA approval. By contrast, the pending marijuana rescheduling proposal relies on a new definition of accepted medical use put forward by the Department of Health and Human Services, which asks if there “is widespread medical use of a drug...under State-authorized programs” and if “there is credible scientific evidence supporting such medical use.”

The pending marijuana rescheduling petition seems likely to upend the DEA’s longstanding interpretation of the CSA’s scheduling criteria. But whether this will have any effect on the status of other Schedule I drugs remains unclear. Rob Mikos has persuasively explained in Marijuana and the Tyrannies of Scheduling that other Schedule I substances are unlikely to be able to satisfy HHS’s new medical use test. But could the marijuana rescheduling proceedings result in a definition of medical use that is unlike either the DEA’s or HHS’s definitions? In a forthcoming article, How Marijuana Rescheduling Could Transform the Controlled Substances Act, 61 Wake Forest L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), I argue that two pieces of evidence from the history of the CSA and the FDCA significantly undermine the DEA’s definition of accepted medical use. This paper builds on my analysis in that forthcoming article to evaluate whether marijuana rescheduling could end with a definition of accepted medical use that would open the door to the rescheduling of some psychedelics that are currently categorized in Schedule I.

Alex Kreit is Associate Professor and Director of the Center on Addiction Law & Policy at the Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law. 

Research Question: 1) How do different types of conflict-of-interest disclosures - financial versus non-financial - affect readers' confidence in psychedelic research results? 2) What framework can psychedelics researchers use to address non-financial conflicts of interest (nfCOIs)?

Methodology: We conducted an experimental survey study where participants evaluated identical clinical trial vignettes about psychedelic-assisted therapy for depression and a migraine treatment (as a comparison condition). Participants rated their confidence in study conclusions and perceived article importance after viewing different disclosure statements: (a) no competing interests, (b) having received industry funding from a pharmaceutical company producing synthetic psilocybin, (b) being an unpaid member on a psychedelic decriminalization advocacy board, (c) having a theoretical commitment about psilocybin requiring psychotherapy, and (d) having taken prior psychedelic coursework during PhD training. We combined this empirical work with conceptual analysis to develop a framework for managing nfCOIs in psychedelic research.

Initial Findings: We will present preliminary results examining how readers respond to financial versus non-financial disclosures in psychedelic research. These initial data address a critical gap in the field, as concerns about advocacy influencing psychedelic science have intensified following allegations that some trial therapists and investigators held strong prior positive beliefs about MDMA. Yet little empirical evidence exists on whether and how different types of nfCOIs affect the public’s perception of psychedelic research.

Building upon our survey results, our conceptual framework proposes that nfCOIs arise when secondary interests risk compromising researchers' adherence to certain scientific norms - such as honesty, rigor, and transparency. Rather than requiring disclosure or recusal, we argue that psychedelic researchers should instead provide documented evidence of norm adherence through observable indicators: pre-registration, open data sharing, independent analysis, and transparent peer review. This approach allows psychedelic researchers to maintain advocacy roles and other non-financial interests while conducting rigorous science.

Katherine Cheung is a PhD student in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University. Daniel Eisenkraft Klein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

This paper explores the legal, cultural, and economic convergence of two seemingly distinct phenomena: the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry and the rapidly expanding 21st-century psychedelic renaissance. Both have been heralded as liberatory alternatives to the failures of modern biomedicine, promising healing through personal autonomy, natural substances, and self-directed spirituality. Yet beneath this emancipatory rhetoric lies a complex web of commodification, regulatory evasion, and public health risk. The contemporary “psychedelic–wellness–grift” nexus reveals how anti-institutional sentiment and deregulatory ideology, long staples of American cultural life, have reemerged in the guise of holistic healing and consciousness expansion, producing a new frontier of legally ambiguous, profit-driven therapeutics. Using historical and doctrinal analysis, the paper situates the current psychedelic-wellness boom within a longer American tradition of snake oil salesmanship, medical skepticism and commercial opportunism, from nineteenth-century patent medicine to the entrepreneurial mysticism of the 1960s. The concatenation of psychedelics and wellness–grift revives these patterns through social media influencers, “biohackers,” and venture-backed retreats, all of who, frame commercial psychedelic therapeutics as self-care or religious experience. This rebranding allows participants to evade much regulation while appealing to widespread anti-institutional sentiment and the rhetoric of medical freedom. Methodologically, this project draws on legislative analysis, policy comparison, and sociolegal case studies of psychedelic ventures in multiple jurisdictions, alongside close reading of digital marketing materials and influencer discourse. It traces the flow of capital and ideology through this emergent psychedelic-industrial complex, demonstrating how scientific research on psychedelic-assisted therapy is selectively appropriated to justify consumer products, retreats, and “integration coaching” unmoored from empirical validation. The resulting marketplace is both ideologically seductive and structurally dangerous: it offers the illusion of empowerment while reproducing familiar hierarchies of access, exploitation, and harm.

The paper contends that this type of convergence exposes enduring tensions in American health law, especially the conflict between individual autonomy and collective safety. The psychedelic–wellness marketplace exemplifies a form of “regulated deregulation,” where the language of liberation conceals profit-driven manipulation and legal evasion. We propose targeted reforms to licensing and advertising regulation, clearer delineation of medical and spiritual practice under state law, and enhanced consumer protection for vulnerable populations seeking relief from mental health suffering. In doing so, we seek to illuminate how law can serve not merely as a reactive instrument but as an ethical boundary for a marketplace increasingly devoted to selling transcendence itself.

Laura Appleman is the Van Winkle Melton Professor of Law & University Research Integrity Officer at Willamette University. Jennifer Oliva is Professor of Law & Val Nolan Faculty Fellow at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Research Scholar at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law, and Senior Scholar with the UCSF/UC Law Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy.

For the last two decades, the state of Colorado has contributed significantly to the professionalizing and formalizing of psychoactive substance access and consumption, including the passage of its medical and adult use marijuana programs in 2000 and 2014, respectively. More recently, Colorado passed Proposition 122, the Natural Medicine and Health Act, in November 2022, providing medical and decriminalized access to the use of many culturally significant psychoactive plants and fungi, including psylocibin. Upon passage of the Natural Medicine Health Act, the state of Colorado approved the formation of the Federally Recognized American Tribes and Indigenous Community Working Group to incorporate the concerns of Indigenous community members into the developing policy of access to natural medicine. Amongst these concerns, Colorado’s SB 23-290 tasked the working group with identifying best practices and approaches to avoid misappropriation of Indigenous cultures, excessive commercialization of the regulated natural medicines, and address conservation issues related to the natural medicines, particularly peyote. Through an integration of Indigenous methodological approaches to policy analysis, ethnography, and oral history, this presentation utilizes the history of peyote and Coahuiltecan and South Texas Chicana/o/x perspectives on peyote to highlight the significance of the Psychedelic Renaissance’s “peyote problem”. By tracing this history, from its Indigenous foundations, through the fraught history of the 20th century counterculture and into the current moment of the so-called “Psychedelic Renaissance,” I highlight the current significant concerns of the exploitation and misappropriation of Indigenous culture and practices and the potential depletion of peyote through the commercialization and popularization of these psychoactive plants. Finally, in so doing, I highlight how the current moment problematizes policymakers’ inability to contend with and accommodate Indigenous perspectives on medicine and religion and the fraught making (and unmaking) of Indigenous identity in the South Texas-Mexico borderlands as evidenced through the Coahuiltecan case.

Informed by plant medicine ceremonies for non-natives led by Shipibo maestros from the Mahua-Lopez lineage, this paper considers two interrelated aspects of such ceremonies: 1) their acoustic ontology, wherein plant spirits are regarded, addressed, and channeled as doctors, masters, and gods that enact healing through song, and 2) tensions and connections between these medicine song practices and western medical paradigms.  

In ceremony, ayahuasca is ingested by singing specialists and becomes the stage for opening worlds of song. Plant spirits are summoned through song, and the singer’s voice becomes the spirit’s acoustic flesh. Human agency is ceded to these doctors, as goes the commonly sung verse, “Ea ronki medico—They say that I am a doctor," or, "Ea ronki bewai—They say that I am singing.” Plant doctors enter and heal patients through the voice. In this paradigm, the real doctors are the plants, and the specialists facilitating the ceremony channel these doctors by ingesting them and cultivating strong energetic connections with them. The material anchor of the ingested plant becomes a bridge to their spiritual presence, which can be made manifest through the material anchor of the voice.  

These practices introduce the following points of contrast with western medical paradigms, attested in Shipibo thought and practice: 1) a reversal of who takes medicine—the impetus to ingest is on the singing specialist, rather than the patient; 2) the doctors working on patients are plant spirits, not humans; 3) the doctors use the instrument and implement of the human voice to heal patients; 4) the song can function surgically in the moment or as long-release substances that absorb into the body like herbal remedies that linger for as long as necessary. The preservation of these strategies by devoted practitioners may offer vital avenues for healing, while honoring indigenous lineages and lifeways that teach connection, reciprocity, and interdependence with the more-than-human world. 

Michelle Bentsman is PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. 

This presentation introduces, to the best of our knowledge, the first study to explore the use of ayahuasca and psychedelics more broadly within the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 23 Haredi participants (12 from Israel and 11 from the United States), analysis of Haredi religious rulings and Q&A forums, and participant observation in Haredi ayahuasca ceremonies, the study examines how members of this closed, ultra-religious, and socially distinct society adopt and adapt ayahuasca use.

After introducing Haredi-adapted ayahuasca ceremonies, a newly emerging context of ayahuasca use that integrates Haredi prayers, songs, symbols, and rituals into the traditional ayahuasca framework, the presentation will outline four key themes that emerged from our research, which employed an inductive thematic analysis. These include: (1) participants’ motivations for ayahuasca use, typically framed in terms of healing and spirituality; (2) the phenomenology of the Haredi ayahuasca experience, often articulated through distinctly Jewish mystical experiences, imagery, and iconography; (3) post-ayahuasca religious transformations, encompassing both deepened faith and more flexible, individualized forms of religiosity; and (4) the religious tensions and strategies of negotiation surrounding ayahuasca use, particularly in relation to mixed-gender ceremonies, and concerns about ayahuasca-related idolatry. Finally, a comparison between the Israeli and American groups highlights both similarities and differences in how these two religiously similar yet culturally distinct communities engage with ayahuasca.

This presentation will introduces a first-of-its-kind study exploring how ayahuasca, and psychedelics more broadly, are experienced, adapted, and negotiated within an ultra-conservative religious context. Our findings highlight the diffusion and adaptation of psychedelic use within fringe and traditionally insular religious communities, revealing novel and distinctive expressions of psychedelic religious phenomenology and outcomes. Overall, our study underscores the cultural context-dependent nature of psychedelic experiences, emphasizes the need for religiously informed therapeutic approaches, and calls for further examination of this emerging phenomenon. 

Jonathan David is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Exeter, UK.

An attempt to document the emerging Entheogenic community in the United States led to the publication in 2025 of a directory which in addition to older Native American and Rastafarian groups that emerged early in the twentieth century, uncovered more than 100 currently operating Entheogenic groups largely founded in the twenty-first century. These groups have produced a relatively scant amount of literature describing their teachings and internal life. Almost all of the groups focus upon religious experiences and call upon individuals assembled by the group to reach conclusions on major theological concerns individually, rather than having their beliefs molded by the group consciousness.  

That being said, in visiting the web sites, the primary means each group has of interacting with the larger community, it was discovered that many of the groups have published a formal statement of their beliefs modeled more or less on belief statements of older religious groups. Taken together, these statements reveal a very diverse community though the majority of groups profess theological positions either identified with ancient Native traditions or resonate with the beliefs of Western Esotericism, a community, largely defined by Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Theosophy. In addition, many groups have also issued a statement aimed at setting a high ethical standard expected of the community of spiritual seekers participating in the group’s activities.

J. Gordon Melton is the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Baylor University.

African Diasporic spiritual traditions are a complex relational field of practices that include African American ancestral rituals and syncretic West African religious traditions. The role of psychedelics is uneven and resists official sanction because of legal restrictions, cultural respect for the plant medicine, the decentralized structure of practitioner communities, and the frequent lack of formal cognitive frameworks for codifying psychedelic experiences for lay practitioners. 

Drawing from interdisciplinary collaboration and ethnographic inquiry, we argue that within many African Diasporic cosmologies, access to non-ordinary forms of consciousness is achieved not only with mind-manifesting medicines, but also through sound, trance, and embodied spiritual practices. The kaleidoscopic relationship with consciousness in African Diasporic communities points to the need for an inclusive approach to understanding non-ordinary states that goes beyond a narrow focus on psychedelics. 

Focusing on Black communities in the Deep South, this presentation examines how individuals draw on psychedelics and other forms of intrapsychic Black survival skills and community-based ritual as forms of ‘generative disobedience’: biocultural liberation that mitigates the embodied effects of historical, intergenerational, and ongoing trauma. ‘Generative disobedience’ is not a rejection of biomedical knowledge but a rebalancing of authority; one that legitimizes approaches as valid and effective pathways to healing. Liberation is experienced not only as psychological relief but as an embodied reorientation toward dignity, belonging, and continuity across the Black Atlantic.

The findings contribute to scholarship on Black healing traditions, cross-cultural spiritual medicine, and racialized health disparities by pointing to the often unspeakable, yet sacred place of psychedelics and other forms of altered states in many African Diasporic spiritual practices. These insights have the potential to improve health outcomes by fostering cultural consonance, relational trust, and spiritually grounded pathways to well-being across communities.

Fanicy Sears is a Licensed Practicing Counselor-Supervisor, Licensed Marriage and family Therapist, National Certified Counselor, and a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of Alabama. Rev. Tonya (Adejoke) Butler-Truesdale, Esq. is an attorney, chaplain, ritual assistant, head of the AlaAse nonprofit, and a MA student in Spirituality at Merrimack College. Lisa Gezon is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

This paper explores how therapists describe the felt experience of working with shifts in therapeutic atmosphere during psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) dosing sessions in Australia. It draws on fieldwork in 2025, including interviews with 30 therapists working in above-ground clinics and research labs, as well as underground practitioners employing PAT-informed models. Many therapists emphasized the importance of maintaining an embodied, holistic presence during dosing sessions. While this is familiar to psychotherapy without drugs, these practitioners describe such sessions as amplifying the sensory and affective awareness of both patient and therapist, sometimes generating non-ordinary forms of interpersonal attunement. 

The language of attunement resonates with philosophers like Heidegger and Uexküll who explored how humans—and, for Uexküll, more-than-humans—are oriented by ambient moods and by the meaningful features of their environments. Psychedelic therapists’ descriptions of interpersonal attunement point to special forms of care and affective labour, in which background moods and invisible perceptions (sometimes called "the field") are sensed as part of the work itself. Therapists described perceiving their own thoughts and feelings not as private and internal but as open to a porous atmosphere that invites enhanced reflexivity and presence. This includes for when patients momentarily see the therapist’s face morph into a father or mother, a god or angel, or a demon or perpetrator, placing further demands on the practical task of psychedelic therapy. This talk explores how therapists navigate the porous personhood of psychedelic care atmospheres. 

Alex Gearin is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, School of Clinical Medicine, The University of Hong Kong.

In 2023, mycologists documented a new native species of psilocybin mushroom in Lesotho, Psilocybe maluti. In their report, they also suggested that Basotho healers in the region were using the mushrooms for ritual and medicinal purposes—if true, this would make the Basotho the first known culture outside the Americas to display indigenous use of serotonergic psychedelics. Here, I report the first results of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork on Basotho use of psilocybin, based on fieldwork conducted in collaboration with local healers from June-August 2025 and January-March 2026. In contrast to prior records of indigenous psychedelic use, which have generally focused on intense altered states of consciousness triggered by large doses of hallucinogens, I report that Basotho use is more akin to 'microdosing': the practice of consuming small, subperceptual doses of a psychoactive substance. I also describe the supernatural and medicinal beliefs around psilocybin among the Basotho, as well as the transmission techniques by which spiritual teachers pass their mycological knowledge onto students. These results suggest a distinct and potentially underreported niche for which human groups may develop techniques for ingesting the psychoactive compounds found in their environments. They also motivate further ethnographic investigation of psychedelic use around the world, particularly in understudied regions like Southern Africa.

Eli Elster is a PhD student in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at UC Davis.

In 1976, the Israeli writer and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel De-Nur began LSD therapy for Concentration Camp Syndrome at the clinic of Dr. Jan Bastiaans in the Netherlands. De-Nur later published a first-person account of the treatment that appeared in English under the title Shivitti: A Vision. The memoir recounts De-Nur’s apocalyptic, kabbalistc-inspired LSD visions and the psychoanalytically-informed care he receives in Bastiaans’ clinic. De-Nur, who published his many books about the Holocaust under the name Ka-Tzetnik [concentration-camper]135633, was summoned to testify at the 1961 Eichmann trial and collapsed on the witness stand after only a few minutes of testimony. This talk will explore how the LSD therapy makes possible for De-Nur a Jewish theological reckoning with what he endured and witnessed that is not possible within the secular legal frame of the Eichmann trial. Reading Shivitti today, I argue, also shows the limits of “mystical experience,” “ego-death,” and “psychoplastogen” as the curative frameworks that have defined much of the current literature on psychedelic neuroscience research and clinical trials. In contrast, the transformation that De-Nur recounts in his memoir shifts the focus away from a brain-based, individualized, modular experience and towards the historical experience of collective suffering and regeneration of a specific community, addressed to other members of that community in the language of a shared tradition. I argue that contemporary psychedelic researchers and clinicians have much to learn from De-Nur’s memoir and the specificity of the psychedelic life-world that he describes, as well as the orientation of his treatment that foregrounds a collective, rather than individual, context (set and setting) for understanding and addressing traumatic suffering.

Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley.

The contemporary reemergence of psychedelic-assisted therapy, particularly psilocybin, invites renewed scholarly attention to the relationship between altered states, healing, and religious experience. While Indigenous and premodern traditions often integrated psychoactive substances within ritual frameworks, Christianity has historically approached such practices with ambivalence—associating them alternately with divine encounter and with pharmakeia (sorcery). This paper situates modern clinical uses of psilocybin within that broader theological history, examining how Christian moral reasoning might engage the phenomenon of psychedelic-assisted therapy without recourse to either prohibition or uncritical endorsement.

The study addresses two guiding theological questions: (1) Did God create psychedelic substances for human benefit? (2) Should Christians endorse their therapeutic use in mental health care? These questions are analyzed through seven structured objections drawn from contemporary Christian discourse: Substance and Sin, Spiritual Dangers, Shortcut, Telos, Demonic Influence, Pharmakeia, and Worldliness. Through these, the paper maps the underlying theological, anthropological, and ethical tensions that psychedelic medicine exposes—between divine providence and human agency, revelation and neurochemistry, moral formation and technological healing.

Methodologically, the paper integrates systematic theology, virtue ethics, and empirical literature on psilocybin’s psychopharmacology and therapeutic mechanisms. It argues that theological engagement with psychedelics provides a constructive framework for re-examining medicine’s moral imagination: how healing is defined, how suffering contributes to virtue, and how spiritual experience is interpreted in clinical contexts.

By analyzing Christian responses to psychedelic therapy as a microcosm of the larger dialogue between religion and medicine, this work contributes to scholarship on psychedelic chaplaincy, moral theology, and the history of religions. It proposes that rigorous theological reflection can illuminate—not resolve—the complex interplay between mystical experience, moral discernment, and the contemporary re-enchantment of healing.

Cayla Bleoaja is an Ecotheology Scholar at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, Campion Hall, University of Oxford.

‘Drugs and Mysticism: An analysis of the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the mystical consciousness’ was the title of Walter Pahnke’s PhD thesis, submitted to Harvard in 1963. This still unpublished text, drawing deeply from the history of religions, has become foundational in psychedelic science and informing all of the iterations of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). There are rumblings of misgivings, but this presentation goes further by asking if it is time to delete the ‘Mystical’ from the MEQ?  

Critical reconsideration of historical norms is part of the scientific method. What happens if Pahnke’s philosophical and methodological presuppositions buckle under contemporary scrutiny? And, what happens if his modest findings (the experiment failed) have been distorted by ‘cheerleading’ and ‘outcome switching’, by those invested in upgrading psychedelic experiences to mystical experiences? Our methodology consists of a critical re-reading of the written traces. We conduct an archaeology of Pahnke’s thesis and present a genealogy of the subsequent desire to believe, found in both the public imagination and the scientific literature.  

Today the ‘Mystical’ in the MEQ invokes an anachronistic religious term with little currency in most of the Academy. This presentation argues that for psychedelic science to be taken seriously (in the humanities, medicine, by funders, insurers and in law) depends on psychedelic practitioners moving beyond their fascination with mystical experiences. Back in 1963 Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert understood the sub-textual ‘political’ implications of Pahnke’s thesis, but 63 years later the psychedelic conversation has moved on. This paper argues not for the erasure of experience, but for its reclassification — from mysticism to a more rigorous, plural, and embodied epistemology. 

Richard Saville-Smith is an intentionally independent scholar on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Sharday Mosurinjohn is an Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Queen's University. 

The psychedelic renaissance has been predominantly shaped by the knowledge culture of biomedicine, which aims at law-like generalizations. The psychedelic humanities offer a complementary perspective that attends to singular constellations of drugs and people. To understand how psychedelics mediate human relations in late modern societies, this talk revisits the idiographic approach to psychopharmacology laid out in Alexander and Ann Shulgin’s “chemical love story” PIHKAL. Rather than pursuing standardized trials, the Shulgins experimented with hundreds of novel compounds in the context of friendship, love, and self-exploration. They attributed distinctive “characters” to each molecule, producing an archive of thick descriptions where the drug’s personality emerged only through its relation to particular users. MDMA-assisted couples therapy provides a second case: here, the effects of a specific substance are mobilized to mediate intimacy and trust, not as generalizable outcomes but as singular therapeutic encounters that reshape communication and vulnerability in ways irreducible to clinical endpoints. Together, these cases illustrate what I call pharmacosociality: the ways psychedelics transform human relationships through situated, relational effects. 

These case studies position the psychedelic humanities neither as a critique of biomedicalization nor as a projects of emancipatory identity politics. Instead, the talk offers an idiographic alternative to the universalizing vision of the psychedelic humanities that Aldous Huxley established in the mid-twentieth century. Huxley’s perennial philosophy bunched together various psychedelics with self-flagellation, fasting, meditation, and prayer as interchangeable shortcuts to the same unio mystica. The Shulgins, by contrast, split rather than lumped, cultivating curiosity for each compound’s singularity. Adopting such an idiographic approach, psychedelic humanities can provide an indispensable supplement to psychedelic science, attentive to the multiplicity of ways in which drugs and people shape each other. 

Nicolas Langlitz is Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. 

This paper explores how Islamic intellectual traditions, particularly Sufism and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), conceptualize altered states of consciousness in relation to contemporary debates on psychedelics and spiritual experience. As global interest in psychedelics for healing and transcendence grows, questions arise about how Islamic frameworks of morality, embodiment, and divine encounter might engage with these phenomena. Drawing on historical, philosophical, and legal sources from the Middle East, this study examines three central questions: (1) How have Sufi traditions understood ecstatic consciousness (wajd, fana’, kashf) and their relationship to divine knowledge? (2) How have Islamic legal scholars differentiated between spiritually transformative and illicit forms of intoxication? (3) What ethical insights might these traditions offer to current discussions on psychedelic therapy and religious freedom? Methodologically, the paper employs a comparative textual analysis of classical Sufi writings (e.g., Rumi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi) and key legal commentaries on intoxication and moral agency, alongside modern philosophical interpretations of consciousness and medical ethics. This interdisciplinary approach situates Islamic thought within broader global dialogues on the moral legitimacy of altering consciousness for spiritual or therapeutic ends. The study finds that while Islamic law historically prohibits intoxicants to preserve rational discernment (‘aql), Sufi epistemology frames altered consciousness as a disciplined, intentional path toward divine truth, an inner transformation rather than sensory indulgence. By connecting these perspectives, the paper argues that Islamic thought can offer a unique and ethically grounded model of consciousness, one that neither romanticizes nor dismisses psychedelic experience but situates it within questions of intention, spiritual responsibility, and communal well-being. Finally, this project invites a cross-cultural dialogue between Islamic ethics and contemporary psychedelic studies, challenging universalist assumptions about what it means to heal, know, and transcend. 

Hana Abbasian is a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

“It was the plants that told us”, paraphrased, is what 11 different maestros from 5 indigenous groups in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon have told me over 10 years and 27 months of field experience. Since commencing advanced degrees at university and an invited formal apprenticeship with the Kichwa in 2019, I sought to find the answer to this statement. The answer revealed itself during doctoral fieldwork through intuitive ethnography involving deep hanging out, participant observation, multispecies autoethnography, and intensive apprenticeship rites. The answer is simple: the plants are always speaking, the ritual technologies held by traditional knowledge holders are the keys to listening.  

This presentation traces the ritual effects of dieta with master plant chiric sanango (Brunfelsia chiricaspi) on human senses of selves. Dieta comprises prolonged periods of isolation with food and behavior restrictions and frequent master plant intake, lying central to rites of apprenticeship and intensive healing practices in many Amazonian traditional knowledge branches. Drawing on van Gennep's rites of passage, Turner's liminality theory, and Viveiros de Castro's multinatural perspectivism, I theorize that dieta creates a state of extended multispecies liminality - a permanent co-habitation where plant and human selves merge.  

The answer to the opening question then becomes: the plants are always speaking, and the sound is coming from inside the house. In bridging traditional knowledge and modern science, this work emphasizes the need for psychedelic scholars to take the field seriously. Doing so means engaging with indigenous ontologies as empirical claims that produce real, tangible effects on senses of selves and bodies, and not dismissing concrete practices as 'taboo' or 'superstitious’. 

Rebekah Senānāyaka received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.